1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of data communications for personal computers (PCs), and in particular to a system for collecting statistics from a network device such as a proxy server.
2. Related Art
The Internet is quickly becoming the preferred data communications medium for a broad class of computer users ranging from private individuals to large multi-national corporations. Such users now routinely employ the Internet to access information, distribute information, correspond electronically, and even conduct personal conferencing. An ever-growing number of individuals, organizations and businesses have established a presence on the Internet through "web pages" on the World-Wide Web ("the Web").
In a typical network arrangement for accessing the Internet, a plurality of client devices may be configured to channel requests for Internet resources, such as Web pages, through a network device known as a proxy, or proxy server. For example, proxy servers are often used to channel requests for client devices residing behind a so-called "firewall," or for client devices which use dial-up connections to an Internet service provider (ISP). For a variety of reasons, it may be desirable to collect statistics relating to the performance of such network devices, as well as other devices including content servers. Moreover, it may sometimes be desirable to collect such performance statistics at a page level (that is, compiled with respect to each requested Web page processed by the network device). Unfortunately, there are no existing tools for collecting page-level statistics from such network devices. Instead, known monitoring tools, such as the Webstone.TM. utility distributed by Silicon Graphics Inc., only collect statistical information at a system level. While system-level statistics may be useful for some purposes, for many applications such statistics provide an insufficient level of detail. Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus to collect page-level statistics from a network device.